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By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

"For a time, [Chimerica] was a symbiotic relationship that seemed like a marriage made in heaven. Put simply, one half did the saving, the other half the spending. Comparing net national savings as a proportion of Gross National Income, American savings declined from above 5 percent in the mid 1990s to virtually zero by 2005, while Chinese savings surged from below 30 percent to nearly 45 percent. This divergence in saving patterns allowed a tremendous explosion of debt in the United States, for one effect of the Asian "savings glut" was to make it much cheaper for households to borrow money than would otherwise have been the case."

By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

"Military experts talk as if the president's decision about whether to send an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan is a make-or-break moment. In reality, his indecision about the deficit could matter much more for the country's long-term national security. Call the United States what you like-superpower, hegemon, or empire-but its ability to manage its finances is closely tied to its ability to remain the predominant global military power."

By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

"...1989 was less of a watershed year than 1979. The reverberations of the fall of the Berlin Wall turned out to be much smaller than we had expected at the time. In essence, what happened was that we belatedly saw through the gigantic fraud of Soviet superpower. But the real trends of our time—the rise of China, the radicalization of Islam, and the rise and fall of market fundamentalism—had already been launched a decade earlier."

By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

"Not so long ago, the dollar stood for a sum of gold, and bankers knew the people they lent to. The author charts the emergence of an abstract, even absurd world-call it Planet Finance-where mathematical models ignored both history and human nature, and value had no meaning."

By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

In making the case for his nuclear-arms-control deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, President Obama has confronted Congress with a stark choice. "There really are only two alternatives here," he declared at last week's press conference. "Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through a negotiation or it's resolved through force, through war."

This binary argument is so central to his administration's case that the president provided a second formulation: Without the deal, he said, "we risk even more war in the Middle East, and other countries in the region would feel compelled to pursue their own nuclear programs, threatening a nuclear arms race in the most volatile region in the world."

By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

In Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, written in the invented language “Nadsat,” the degenerate hooligan Alex ultimately resolves to settle down. “Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth,” wrote Burgess, “and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate.” Burgess’s US publisher thought this ending too happy, and axed the final chapter.

By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

CAMBRIDGE – Like most people who create an “ism,” John Maynard Keynes quickly found his followers running ahead of him. “You are more Keynesian than I am,” he once told a young American economist. Now it is the turn of his biographer, Robert Skidelsky, to become distinctly more Keynesian than Keynes.

By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

It is already conventional to name the former party leaders Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage as the biggest losers of the British general election, closely followed by all the opinion pollsters and the narcissistic comedian Russell Brand. But this is to understate the abject defeat suffered by some Keynesian economists, and in particular the Nobel prize winning former Princeton professor Paul Krugman.

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We host a busy schedule of events throughout the fall, winter and spring. Past guests include: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, former Vice President Al Gore, and former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev.